With the advent of technology, there has been a tremendous change in purchasing trends of the consumers and sellers have expanded the market manifold to meet the demands of the consumers. However, some of the sellers have taken unfair advantage of the consumer purchasing trends to sell counterfeiting or fake products. Hence, significant portion of the products sold via online stores or physical stores are counterfeit products. In one example scenario, products manufactured by a producer may be distributed globally through a supply chain. The supply chain may include intermediaries, such as retailers, whole-sellers, authorized or non-authorized vendors, etc. In such a scenario, during a transit or storage, the products may be replicated by counterfeiters. As the products are globally distributed, there may be trading between one or more countries through parallel importing of the products. In such scenario, rate of counterfeiting of products may be high as products sold through parallel importing may lack consent of the actual producer. At present, counterfeit products have become one of the major issues encountered by both consumers and sellers. Such counterfeiting of products, for example, pharmaceutical items or edible products may cause life-threatening consequences. In addition, the consumer may not be provided with proper customer support from the producer due to lack of authenticity of the product purchased.
Both the manufacturers and the consumers are affected directly or indirectly due to counterfeiting. In an example scenario, a manufacturer may not be aware of his products being counterfeited and a consumer may purchase one of these products and may later realize that the product is not genuine. The consumer may seek for customer support from the manufacturer. However, customer support may be denied by the manufacturer due to lack of product authenticity. In such a scenario, the consumer loses trust in the manufacturer and may not continue to purchase further from the same manufacturer in future which may likely to hinder the business of the manufacturer.
The manufacturer may provide a customer support to process a refund to the customer. However, some other customers may be encouraged to seek refunds by means of using counterfeited products. Moreover, if a consumer had consumed counterfeited medicines or edible foods, then consequences can be hazardous to health or even life-threatening. Although, there are measures adopted to prevent counterfeiting by law enforcement, it becomes tedious for the law enforcement agencies to track the supply chain in a large market filled with counterfeit products. On the other hand, verifying counterfeit products may not be possible for a consumer as the counterfeit products may be almost same as the genuine products.
In view of the above, there is a need to overcome issues due to counterfeiting of products. Moreover, there is a need to provide techniques for authentication of the products to protect the products against counterfeiting. Furthermore, there is a need to provide techniques for tracking the products that can help to address parallel imports.